From the course: Photography Foundations: Composition

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Guiding the viewer's eye

Guiding the viewer's eye

From the course: Photography Foundations: Composition

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Guiding the viewer's eye

As I have mentioned many times during this course, the purpose of composition is to order a scene so that it makes sense to the viewer, so that they understand what your subject is. That inherently means that you are guiding their eye through the scene to your subject so that they know how to read it. If you have successfully taken a good composition then you have already successfully guided the viewer's eye. Nevertheless, it's not a bad idea to practice this process of really trying to drive their eye somewhere. A lot of scenes in the world have complexity in them, maybe have multiple subjects, maybe have more or less ambiguous subjects. So I think a good way to practice guiding the viewer's eye is to find a scene like this where there is a very obvious subject, where there's no doubt what the subject is, and then work up different ways of guiding the viewer's eye to that subject. You can try it with geometry, as we have here. You can try it with tone. You can even try it with color.…

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